


Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance

by spooky_bee



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Angst, But also, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Multi, Polyamory, Post-Canon, Riza-centric, Weddings, because i'm writing this and she is my Most Precious Child, bed sharing, i brought greed back because why not tbh, post-war blues, these nerds are dumb and bad at everything
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-04-04
Packaged: 2018-05-18 07:26:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5905432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spooky_bee/pseuds/spooky_bee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I'm not the only one who thinks this is weird, right? I mean, when we first met him, Edward Elric was a little kid in a wheelchair, missing an arm and a leg, and now he's managed to get his arm back, he's of legal drinking age, and he's getting married." </p><p>It is kind of weird, Riza agrees, although it really shouldn't be. After all, settling down and getting married is what men Edward's age usually do. And yet it feels so incongruous for Edward Elric, who saw the Gate three times, punched a god in the face, and was one of the brightest alchemists Riza had ever met, to be doing something so normal. It would be like the Brigadier General getting married, or her. She has to suppress a giggle at the thought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I know that like five million of this exact fic exist, but I've never been 100% satisfied with ones that I've read, and so I have taken it upon myself to write one. Also I've been watching a lot of Bridezillas lately, and so I'm kind of obsessed with weddings at the moment.
> 
> Some things you need to know:  
> This fic is set three years after the Promised Day. Ed is back from his travels, but Al is still in Xing. Roy has been promoted to Brigadier General, Riza has been promoted to Captain, and they are overseeing the rebuilding of Ishval. Ling is not yet the emperor of Xing. Alkahestry was used to bring back Greed. Don't think about it too much. Suspend your disbelief for the sake of polyamory.
> 
> Fic title is the name of an album by Belle & Sebastian.

Riza has always been an early riser, but never this early.

When they had first come to Ishval-- _first come_ back  _to Ishval_ , she corrects--the call to prayer every morning grated at her nerves. Some mornings it came even before the sun was up, and she could hear, without the insulation of the white noise of a city around her, the opening and shutting of doors and the shuffle of hundreds of feet as Ishvalans dutifully left their homes and walked to the temple. She would lie awake, waiting for the noise to stop, only to snatch another hour or two of sleep before getting up for the day. After a month or so, however, the sound eventually just integrated itself into her day. She's never been able to sleep through it, but her day has grown organically around it, and so now she simply gets up with the sun.

Her building, like most of the buildings in Ishval now, is new. It's tall and narrow, three storeys, and built of a light stone that keeps out the heat despite not having central air-conditioning. The second and third storeys are individual flats, with the ground floor comprising a kitchen and sitting area. It's smaller than Riza's flat back in Central, but she doesn't mind. She doesn't need all that much space, particularly since she left Black Hayate with Fuery. She only has herself to worry about, now. Well, for the most part.

She wakes upon hearing the usual drone of the call to prayer, but, rather than treading her usual path to the shower, she walks over to her window, pulling back the makeshift curtains. Watching the Ishvalans walk to the temple in the weak, early morning sunlight, in small units of families and friends, Riza thinks about how quickly humanity is able to rebuild itself, about its stubborn resiliency. They did their damnedest to wipe Ishval off the map, and here she is, years later, one of the people who had been complicit in that endeavor, watching them have a perfectly normal morning. And hardly any of this is thanks to Amestris. Amestrians are mainly there for bureaucratic and pecuniary reasons; aside from that, they've done very little. Almost all of the work that Riza sees looking down from her window was done by Ishvalans for themselves and each other. 

She never thought that she would feel anything for Ishval other than disgust and horror, but now, she thinks that she'll actually miss it a bit this time around when she inevitably goes back to Amestris. She's carved out a life for herself here, and it's a peaceful one. Quiet. The quiet is nice.

But she can't stand at her window forever. She has work to do, work more difficult than rebuilding any country, and so she puts on her slippers and pads out of her flat and into the stairwell. She knocks a few times on the door of the third storey, midway between the knock of a postman and a visiting friend: gentle, but too authoritative to ignore.

"Sir?" she says to the door. "Sir, we'll need to get going soon so that we can make our train."

Living with the Colonel--the _Brigadier General_ , he hasn't been a colonel for over a year at this point, but she had spent so long using that in lieu of his name that even switching to another title feels unnatural--is odd. They haven't lived together since they were practically children, and never so unsupervised. It's only them in their tall, narrow house, although, aside from work, they don't see much of each other. The Brigadier General keeps to himself much more these days than he used to.

When she gets no response, she knocks again, this time louder. " _Sir,_ " she pleads. "The train _will_ leave without us. And you know how trains to Resembool are. If we miss this train, we'll miss the wedding completely." Getting to Amestris from Ishval is a nightmare. There's no direct train line connecting the two countries, and so they have to drive two hours to the Ishvalan/Amestrian border, take a train from there to East City, and from there to Resembool. Resembool is not exactly a bustling tourist destination, and so the train they need only runs once a week. If they miss it, they're screwed. 

When the Brigadier General opens the door, he looks less haggard than she expects (which would have been a sign that he had forgotten and overslept) and more hurried. He's in civilian clothes, a cool-looking white cotton shirt and slacks, but his hair is rumpled from where he had surely been running his fingers through it anxiously.

"I swear I've forgotten something," he says.

"We're only going to be gone a week, sir."

"I know that, but you never know what you'll need." 

Brigadier General Roy Mustang packs like an overbearing mother, as if every ounce of oversight he had for paperwork was redirected toward what was needed to travel. Riza has learned this over the years from having to travel with him many times: if there is something you need, he probably has it. If there is something you, or anyone else for that matter, _don't_ need, then he _definitely_ has it.

"I would think I do, sir," she replies. "We're just going to Resembool."

"Yes, but we're going to Resembool for a _wedding._ Do you know how hard it is to pack a tuxedo, Lieutenant?" he asks imploringly, and then, without missing a beat, amends: "Captain?" Neither of them are entirely used to their not-so-new new names, it seems.

"You aren't packing your dress uniform, sir?"

"No," he says, voice taking on the distant quality that it has acquired in recent months. "It just doesn't feel appropriate. And besides, it's not like Fullmetal will be wearing one."

"You never gave him one, sir."

"Exactly," he says, smiling with some of the old devilishness  that made him so notorious among the women of Central and East. "They didn't make them that small."

She leaves him to his packing, heading down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor. Once there, she puts the kettle on and puts ground coffee into the press pot. The pot is technically the Brigadier General's, brought from Central, but he made a point of saying that anything of his was open to her, and since she almost always is up before him, she uses it more than he does. She's more of a tea drinker herself, but with her shifted schedule, as well as the shift in time zones moving east, she's taken up drinking coffee, but cut heavily with milk and sugar.

As she pushes the plunger down on the press pot, the Brigadier General sweeps into the kitchen, toting his leather, monogrammed suitcase (a gift from his aunt, and an expensive one at that).

"Is that coffee?" he asks with the same hope and desperation of a person wandering through the desert who chances upon an oasis.

"It is," she says, pouring coffee into one of the two cups sitting before her and pushing it toward him.

"Bless you," he says, placing his suitcase on the floor and sitting heavily at the table.

After drinking his coffee (which he takes black and in huge quantities), he makes them a simple breakfast, which they eat quickly and in relative silence.

From all that Riza thinks she knows about interpersonal interaction, which is a fair bit at this point, she thinks that she should be more uncomfortable with their quietude than she is. They haven't talked much, or for extended periods of time, since they were kids in her father's house. In East, and then in Central, they weren't able to talk to each other much without arousing suspicion (even if that suspicion was entirely unfounded), and so they simply grew accustomed to each other's silence. And so now, where they are ostensibly in charge and have no one to impress or pander to, it still feels the most normal to go about their cohabitation quietly.

After the dishes are done, Riza grabs her own suitcase (plainer and shabbier than the Brigadier General's, but she travels less than he does, and less publicly) and heads out the door, holding it open for him. She doesn't lock the door behind them, because really there's no need. Everyone in Ishval is too tired from rebuilding a country to commit much crime, and there are still people who, no matter how much the Brigadier General abases himself and tries to appear authoritative yet affable, are scared of him. She can't blame them, honestly. No matter how much of her idea of him is made up of the man who had a tendency to become so bored by paperwork that he fell asleep at his desk, and once drunk-dialed her to offer her flowers, she can't entirely excise the man who decimated whole cities with a snap of his fingers, who charred a homunculus to cinders and ash before her eyes. And she can't remove herself from that, either. She probably killed relatives of some of the nice, mild-mannered people she saw walking from her window. Nobody wants to break into the home of the Hero of Ishval and the Hawk's Eye.

The soldier who had volunteered to drive them across the border is a young woman, only a bit older than the Elrics, young enough that she had been in the academy at the time of the Ishvalan extermination and had never seen any of it firsthand. She's still chipper, sporting a toothy grin that shines brightly in contrast to her dark brown skin, endearingly situated under a mop of curly brown hair. She's young and idealistic and reminds her a little of the Brigadier General when he was that age, although less in personality than in sheer enthusiasm.

"Hi, Brigadier General; Captain," she says, saluting them both from the driver's seat of her jeep. "You ready to go?"

They toss their luggage in the passenger's seat and both climb in the back. 

The young woman, a Sergeant Charlotte "Charlie" Kelly, has taken a liking to the Brigadier General and flirts with him mercilessly from the front seat, causing Riza to roll her eyes as she watches the scenery gradually transition from arid to green. Sergeant Kelly is harmless, and Riza seriously doubts that she is actively trying to seduce him, even though out here, with the lack of direct military supervision, the rules about hierarchy are a little bit fuzzier than they would be back home. And besides, it would be a cold day in Ishval when Roy Mustang wouldn't enjoy a pretty woman flirting with him.

Sergeant Kelly is a gifted conversationalist, and clearly glad to be getting out of what the younger Amestrian soldiers have affectionately termed "the sand pit." She's also fairly observant, because she doesn't engage Riza much, which Riza appreciates. As much as she likes her, Sergeant Kelly makes her kind of sad. Maybe she is what Riza and the Brigadier General would've been like if they had just been born a decade later: optimistic, eager, cheerful. Happy, even. 

After showing their passports and visas to the border guards, Sergeant Kelly helps Riza and the Brigadier General with their luggage, and shoots them a final jaunty salute.

"Enjoy your vacation, you two!" she says with an insubordinate wink. "The sand pit won't be the same with you guys gone."

"Oh, I'm sure," the Brigadier General says, giving her one of those Roy Mustang Smirks, the ones he used to con special favors out of the girls in archiving, and attempted to use on Riza to get out of work.

Sergeant Kelly laughs, full-throated and bright, and says "Well, I'll be going. See you this time next week!" 

"That girl is something else," the Brigadier General says, watching as her jeep leaves a trail of dust in its wake.

"She's certainly keen on you, sir," Riza says, allowing herself a small smile at the sheer ridiculousness of the situation. An officer a full decade younger than him has a crush on him, and he is powerless to stop it.

"Don't worry," he says, picking up his suitcase by the handle. "She'll grow out of it."

It's been a while since she's been on a train. Since they've come to Ishval, the Brigadier General has gone back to Amestris several times on personal business, like helping Madam Christmas relocate to East, but she's only left once, on the call of Führer Grumman, to accompany the Brigadier General back to Central to report on their progress in Ishval. A few years ago, it seemed like she was always on trains, but she's fallen out of the habit now. Not the Brigadier General, though; hardly fifteen minutes after they've pulled out from the station, he's asleep, head propped on his hand.

He would kill her for saying this, but he's started to show his age a little. After years of near-constant stress and anxiety, there are fine lines between his eyebrows and on his forehead. But there are also small lines at the corners of his eyes, from where he has the tendency to crinkle them when he laughs. They've both cleared thirty now, and those three decades were anything but peaceful, but it's still odd to think that the man napping across the compartment from her is the same young man who showed up at her father's house one morning and wouldn't leave until he agreed to take him on as an apprentice. He had been so young, and so smart, and so absolutely sure that he was going to change the world. He was right in that respect, of course, although she doubts that he changed the world in the way he thought he would when he was fourteen.

When he's asleep like this, though, the line between Brigadier General Mustang, who came out on the victorious end of a coup d'état and is overseeing the rebuilding of a country he assisted in destroying, and Mr. Mustang, the skinny kid who just wanted to help people, seems less defined. Somehow he's both and neither of those people. When he's sleeping he's just Roy.

He wakes up as they pull into East City and yawns. Riza returns her eyes to her book, an Amestrian translation of an Ishvalan holy text. She thinks that, this time around, she should actually learn something about the country she's living in.

"We're you watching me sleep, Captain?" he asks ruefully.

"Of course not, sir," she lies.

"What a shame," he says, standing and stretching his arms over his head. "Someone needs to watch out for me while I sleep. Since I got promoted and I'm in charge of rebuilding Ishval, I'm sure the calls for my assassination will skyrocket."

"Something tells me that no one would try to assassinate you on a train to East City."

"You don't know that," he says, reaching for their bags on the luggage racks above the seats of their compartment.

The train ride from East City to Resembool is considerably shorter than the ride from the border to East City, and with the Brigadier General both awake and bored, he decides to chitchat with her.

"You know, Captain, I think this is the first time we've been to Resembool since we first met the Elrics."

"I think you're right," she says, looking out over rolling green hills. It's been almost a decade since they first met Edward and Alphonse Elric, but the scenery doesn't seem to have changed much. There are still sheep milling aimlessly about in their pastures, completely unaware of their town's most famous resident.

"It doesn't look any different," he muses. "I'm not sure what I expected, honestly, but it looks exactly the same."

"It's not exactly like Resembool was a hotbed of conflict, sir," she says. "There's no reason for it to have changed."

Still, though, she can kind of see what he means. The effect isn't eerie, exactly, but it is odd for something to look exactly the same as it did before homunculi, before philosopher's stones, before the Elrics lost their bodies, even. Resembool feels oddly atemporal. It feels like this town, like everywhere else in Amestris, should show some sign of the turmoil the rest of the country had been feeling, but it doesn't. It's just as green and quiet and full of sheep as it's probably always been.

"It does feel strange, though, to be visiting Fullmetal not on business."

"He's not 'Fullmetal' anymore, sir," she reminds him. He had willingly signed over his state alchemist certification, and, besides, he wasn't an alchemist anymore.

The Brigadier General wrinkles his nose at the thought. "Then what do I call him now?"

"His name, probably."

Riza thinks that, if anything, Edward Elric deserves to be called by his name at this point in his life, like any other young man his age. He's spent enough time as a pawn of the military, so letting go of that one little linguistic quirk seems fair

"Edward Elric," he tries experimentally. 

"All his friends call him 'Ed,'" she offers.

He considers it for a moment. "Nope, I'll just call him 'Elric.'"

"But there's two Elrics, sir."

"Well, there's about to be three," he reminds her. "I'm not the only one who thinks this is weird, right? I mean, when we first met him, Edward Elric was a little kid in a wheelchair, missing an arm and a leg, and now he's managed to get his arm back, he's of legal drinking age, and he's getting _married._ " 

It is kind of weird, Riza agrees, although it really shouldn't be. After all, settling down and getting married is what men Edward's age usually do. And yet it feels so incongruous for Edward Elric, who saw the Gate three times, punched a god in the face, and was one of the brightest alchemists Riza had ever met, to be doing something so _normal_. It would be like the Brigadier General getting married, or her. She has to suppress a giggle at the thought.

"He is twenty-one, sir."

He groans, leaning his head against the train window. "God, Captain, don't say that. You're making me feel so old."

She quirks a small smile. "Well, you are thirty-five, Brigadier General."

"Well, you're thirty-three, Captain. You're no spring chicken yourself."

She gives a quiet laugh. Ah, if everyone who had heard stories of the silver-tongued devil, Roy Mustang, putting his foot in his mouth so completely, they'd die of shock. She wants to make a joke about him never being able to find a girlfriend if he speaks to women that way, but decides against it. "Yes, but that doesn't bother me nearly as much as it bothers you."

"I suppose," he says, turning to look out the window. "Although, it's easier to tell people that you're afraid of going grey than that you're afraid you wasted your youth following the orders of a corrupt government in order to satisfy your own ambition."

The train may as well have skidded to a halt. All of their conversations have been so safe since the Promised Day, which is odd, because, finally, they don't have to be. And yet they don't have the furtive, late-night meetings they had by candlelight when they were children, or the coded, meaning-laden talks they had back in Central. They talk a lot about the weather (dry and hot, always), and about what their friends are doing in their various corners of Amestris. They don't have conversations like this, though.

"What would you have done if you hadn't become an alchemist?" she asks before she even entirely realizes what she's saying. It isn't like her to pry into other people's personal lives, not even with him.

He looks away from the window and back at her, eyes wide. "You know," he says, "I don't think anyone has ever asked me that before."

These moments aren't built to last, though, and the train does stop, pulling into the Resembool train station with the gentleness of power trading hands. 

He reaches up to the luggage rack and pulls down her suitcase, handing it to her silently before grabbing his own. They walk quietly down to the door of the train in a straight line. As they alight onto the platform, they're greeted with the unmistakable voice of Edward Elric. 

"Well, look at you two," he says, arms crossed and grin lopsided. "I hardly even recognized you without the uniforms." They had decided to forgo the uniforms altogether. It had been so long since Riza had been in civilian clothes that she had had to dig through her small closet to find anything that would have been suitable, pulling out her old standby high-necked black shirt and a skirt. "And look at you, Lieutenant, you chopped off all your hair!"

Riza reaches up, feeling the place where her hairline fades into the skin of her neck. It had just been easier when she had returned to Ishval to keep her hair short than constantly worry about keeping her hair up. It was easier this way, honestly. "It's 'Captain' now, actually," she says.

"Congrats," he says warmly, and then turns to the Brigadier General. "And what about you? Are you still Colonel Jackass, or have you been promoted?"

"I'm Brigadier General Jackass now," he says with a laugh. They must have gotten older, Riza thinks, for this to be good-natured ribbing instead of the opening lines of a fistfight. She's known that they've liked each other for years at this point, but it took them a little longer to catch up with her train of thought. The Brigadier General has been the closest thing that Edward has had to a father for a while now, however terrifying that thought may be, and they've both taken this unspoken arrangement quite seriously.

"Well, whatever your rank is, we should probably get going. It's a fair hike from here to the house. Do you need any help carrying your bags?"

"No," Riza says, gripping hers by the handle and hoisting it up. "I think we'll be fine."

The Brigadier General and Edward banter back and forth the whole two miles or so from the train station to the Elric house, giving Riza plenty of time to get a good look at Edward. She hasn't seen him since the aftermath following the Promised Day, and it's amazing the difference three years makes. They--"they" being herself and the Brigadier General--had kept up correspondence since, going from cheeky postcards of Edward's travels to letters pages long, that the Brigadier General would stay up late into the night reading in their kitchen. The letters he sent her tended to be shorter, less personal, but entertaining and happily accepted all the same. But from those letters (and a handful of very expensive international telephone calls) it was difficult to actually see the man that fiery little Edward Elric had grown into.

He stands about level with the Brigadier General now, and although he still carries himself with a kind of youthful nonchalance that she wonders if he'll ever grow out of, his spine stands a little straighter, his shoulders a little broader. His signature red coat and braid are nowhere to be seen, replaced by a breezy linen shirt and a mature-looking ponytail. He looks like an adult now. He had situated himself so firmly in her mind as a child that seeing him like this is a little jarring. She can understand the Brigadier General's discomfort a little more now.

Riza recognizes the house as it crests into view, a cozy little cottage on top of a hill, backed by a sky so blue that it could only be seen in Resembool.

"So this is the place, huh?" the Brigadier General says, placing his free hand on his hip and looking up to regard the house more fully.

"Yeah, it's not much, but considering it was built by a teenager who had never held a hammer before and an alchemist who was still adjusting to having a body, I'd say it's pretty impressive."

"Wait," Riza says. "You built this?" It looks almost identical to the house they had tried to resurrect their mother in. If this one is in the same spot, what happened to the other one?

"Me and Al did, yeah," Edward says proudly, surveying his own handiwork.

"Where is Alphonse?" Riza asks.

"Let's discuss that over a couple beers," Edward says. "It's starting to get hot out here, and you guys are probably beat from traveling."

"You shouldn't be offering us beers, kid," the Brigadier General grumbles.

"I am of legal drinking age, grandpa," Edward returns. "And besides, the Captain looks like she could use a beer, and you wouldn't deny her that, would you?" He shoots a smug look at the Brigadier General and begins his ascent up the hill.

Inside, the house is warmly decorated and remarkably spacious given how it looked from outside.

"You built all of this yourselves?" Riza asks, looking around.

"Well, not the furniture," Edward says. "Everything else, though, yeah."

Riza finds it amazing that, after having seen so much alchemy, having seen the world almost destroyed, seen people perform amazing feats of both bravery and violence, that she can still be impressed with something as simple as someone having built a house, and yet here she is, very impressed. 

"Well, don't just stand there holding your bags," Ed says. "Make yourselves at home and I'll get those beers."

They place their bags at the foot of the stairs and sit gingerly on opposite ends of a comfortable, if already slightly worn-looking, couch. For a house of its size, it has an unusual number of windows, letting in so much light that everything seems to be faintly glowing.

Edward returns from the kitchen toting three opened bottles of beer and sets them all down on the coffee table before sitting in an armchair across from them.

"Where is Alphonse?" the Brigadier General asks.

Edward snorts. "Still in Xing."

"What? Really? Shouldn't he have gotten back to Amestris around the same time as you?"

"Well, he was  _supposed_ to, but do you remember Mei Chang?"

Riza feels the muscles in her throat tighten involuntarily. She remembers Mei Chang distinctly.

"The little Xingese girl with the funny cat?" the Brigadier General asks.

"Well, she's not so little anymore," Edward says. "Hang on." He gets back up, walking to the front door. Mounted by the doorframe is a small cubby full of letters, from which he grabs an envelope. Sitting back down at the coffee table, he pulls a folded letter from the already-open envelope, unfolds it, and removes a glossy photograph, handing it to the Brigadier General, who takes it with careful fingers, cautious to keep from getting fingerprints on it.

"Well, would you look at that," he says, holding it out to Riza.

She takes it, and it takes a full moment to realize who precisely she is looking at. She had only gotten to see Alphonse briefly after he had finally gotten his body back, and he had looked like he had been living in the middle of the woods since they had done that human transmutation all those years ago. The young man in the picture looks nothing like a suit of armor, and next to nothing like the boy she saw on the Promised Day. She can tell because of the young woman standing next to him that he's tall, quite tall, and broad-shouldered. His blond hair is kept short, and his gold eyes are wide and happy. That is what Alphonse  _should_ look like right now, and it gives Riza immense pleasure to see it. The young woman next to him, though, is unmistakably Mei Chang, however, although Edward was right: she was not the little girl she had been when she saved Riza's life. She's nowhere near as tall as Alphonse, but the cheongsam that she's wearing (a tight, high-necked Xingese dress that is all the rage with Amestrian women these days) shows that she's certainly no child anymore. She looks like the photographer caught her mid-sentence, which, from what Riza remembers of her, is the most appropriate way for her to be photographed.

Riza hands the photo back to Edward, who places it back in its envelope.

"They had gotten quite chummy while he was there studying alkahestry, and he elected to extend his stay," Edward explains ruefully. "Of course, being the nerd that he is, he said it's because there was still a lot more to learn, but I know an idiot in love when I see one."

"Speaking from personal experience?" the Brigadier General asks with a smirk.

"Maybe," he says, grinning. Riza remembers when the mere mention of the possibility of him having feelings for Winry would send him into a frenzy, and now here he is, taking it all in stride. He spat tea on her dog when she tried to say something similar. Oh, how the times have changed.

"And where is Winry?" she asks, watching as he lifts the bottle of beer to his lips. She's been fond of the girl ever since they met the first time that Riza and the Brigadier General had come to Resembool, and she's eager to see her.

"Still in Rush Valley," Edward says with a sigh.

"Your wedding is in a week, Elric," the Brigadier General intones.

"I know that, asshole," Edward says, setting down his beer. "She's been splitting her time between Rush Valley and here since I got back, but when she gets here in a couple days, it's permanently." The look of excitement in his eyes is apparent. "She's finishing up training her replacement right now, and when she gets back here, she's going to take over Rockbell Automail."

"Pinako's retiring?" the Brigadier General asks in surprise.

"Not without a fight," Edward replies. "But it's time for Winry to come home, so she was persuaded." Edward takes another swig from his beer and sighs. "But enough about me. You two probably want to see where you'll be staying."

"A shower would be nice," Riza says, taking a small sip of her beer. It's from a brewery out in East City, one she remembers drinking on draft when she was in the academy. 

"Eager to get rid of us already?" the Brigadier General asks as Edward stands.

"Oh yeah," Edward jokes drily. "Definitely."

They follow him up the stairs, with him pointing out the house's landmarks as they go. "That's my room, and the room next to it is Alphonse's. The bathroom is at the end of the hall, and this," he says, stopping at a door on the far right of the hallway, "is where you'll be staying."

He opens the door like a magician prepared to unveil his greatest trick, and the reaction that he gets upon doing so is similar to what a magician would get from a particularly crafty illusion: shock, primarily, followed by a little startled laughter.

"There's only one bed," the Brigadier General points out lamely, looking into the quite homey little room which, he is right, has only one bed.

Edward blinks. "Um...yeah? Is that a problem?"

"There are two of us," Riza responds, although it feels a little silly to be teaching a grown man how to count.

"I mean, yeah, obviously. But you're..." He looks confusedly over at the Brigadier General. "Wait a minute. You two aren't...?"

"No, Edward, we're not," the Brigadier General replies.

The old Edward Elric would have colored at the mistake, stammered something, maybe, but this new, grown-up Edward Elric looks slightly crestfallen at the news.

"Well, one of you can sleep on the couch, I guess," he says.

The Brigadier General says "I'll do it," at the same time that Riza says "There's no need."

Both men stop to look at her. "We're both adults," she explains. "And besides, we've slept in worse conditions than this before. If the Brigadier General wouldn't be mortified to share a bed with me for a few days, it shouldn't be a problem."

"I--" the Brigadier General stammers. "Whatever you would prefer, Captain."

"Well, with that sorted, I'm going to take a shower," Riza says, placing her suitcase down in the room before squeezing past them down the hall. "If you'll excuse me."

 _This is fine,_ Riza thinks as she waits for the shower to heat up. She has survived a war, being the personal aid of a homunculus, a revolution, and having her neck sliced. Surely, sharing a bed for a week with Roy Mustang wouldn't even figure on the list of things that would trouble her. _And yet,_ she thinks as the steam begins to lick at the bathroom mirror. _And yet._


	2. Chapter 2

Ed and Roy stand silently in the hallway, watching as Captain Hawkeye's back recedes, disappearing into the bathroom, until they hear the hiss of the shower beginning to run. When he's sure that she won't hear him, Ed rounds on Roy.

"What's going on?" he asks.

"Nothing," Roy says to him, confused.

"Yeah, that's what I mean," Ed continues. "I thought..." He sighs. "Let's go back downstairs. I need my beer for this."

He can practically feel Roy's confusion rattling off his back, which would be funnier if he hadn't been in the exact same shoes not that long ago. He had thought that Roy was past that now, but apparently he had been mistaken, and if he's going to explain this to someone twice his age, he's going to need a beer.

"What are you going on about?" Roy asks, sitting back down on the couch, on the far left, as if Hawkeye's ghost were still sitting at the other end.

"So you and the Captain aren't involved," Ed says, less as a question than a tentative statement of fact.

"Correct."

"See," Ed says, picking up his beer and gesturing at Roy with it. "That's what I don't understand."

"What about me having an appropriate professional relationship with my subordinate is so difficult for you to comprehend?" Roy asks, clearly trying to affect his typical disinterested drawl, but coming off sounding rather tense.

"The fact that you're clearly in love with her!"

Roy sighs. Something tells Ed that Roy has had various permutations of this conversation before, which should tell him something in itself.

"Were you writing the same letters I was reading?" Ed asks. "Because _God,_ Mustang, it was like every other line was Hawkeye-this, Hawkeye-that." He puts on an impression of Mustang's sultry baritone: "'Captain Hawkeye has been an irreplaceable part of this endeavor, the bravest soldier I've ever met, my most loyal subordinate, and her hair shines like gold in the desert sun'."

"I never wrote that!"

"You might as well have." Ed watches as Roy takes what he hopes is an embarrassed swig of his beer. "I mean, come _on_ , you _live_ together for fuck's sake!"

"Yeah," Roy says drily, "in separate apartments."

"Separate apartments _in the same building,_ " Ed says, pointing his beer bottle at Roy for emphasis. 

"If that were all it took to be in love with someone," Roy says, "then I've also been in love with a Xingese greengrocer, a seventy-five-year-old piano teacher, and a woman who smoked a pipe off her fire escape while holding her pet ferret."

"But you clearly think that she's amazing." Ed honestly considers digging out some of those old letters and reading them back to him. The way Hawkeye had been described, it only made sense that the two of them would be together. It honestly makes less sense for him to be denying the obvious so vigorously.

Roy nods, taking a drink. "Of course I do. Captain Hawkeye is a fantastic soldier and an old friend, but that doesn't mean I'm in love with her."

"But it _should_ ," Ed intones, dropping some of his joviality. "Well, not just that. But you deserve to be happy, you old bastard, and I think you'd be happy with her."

"I am happy with her."

"That's not what I mean and you know it."

"Edward," Roy says, leaning forward and placing his elbows on his knees, like a teacher sitting a particularly disorderly pupil down for a cautionary chat. "Even if I did have feelings for the Captain, it would be against the law for me to do anything about it. She is my subordinate, and it would be inappropriate and complicated for us to get involved. These rules exist for a reason, and it's so that men and women in my position don't abuse their power over their subordinates. We have too much work to do, and I would never jeopardize that." 

Ed may not look it, but he's a romantic. He wants to say screw the laws, it would be worth it, that they're both so good at codes and secrets that nobody would even know, but it's pointless. Ed knows Roy well enough at this point to know that the objective always takes precedent, even over his own personal happiness.

Ed leans back in his chair and takes a long drink of his beer. "Then you need to hurry up and get yourself a wife so I don't have to worry about you so damn much."

Roy laughs, the first laugh he's gotten out of him since he's been here. 

"You know who you sound like?" Roy asks as his laugh dies down.

"Who?"

Roy's eyes shine, although if with happiness or sadness, Ed can't tell. "Hughes."

The sound of the shower turning off upstairs startles them both. "So, uh, did you two have plans for dinner?" Ed asks suddenly.

Both Ed and Roy are keenly aware of the sound of the bathroom door opening, and of two bare feet padding down the hall, followed by another door closing.

"Plans? In Resembool?" Roy asks. "Hardly."

"Just thought I'd check before I invited you. Pinako is making stew if you wanna tag along."

"I've always liked Pinako," Roy says. "She reminds me of my aunt."

When Riza comes down the stairs, she's in a different shirt and a pair of loose-legged pants and she looks considerably more comfortable than she had earlier. She sits down in the spot that Roy had obviously saved for her and asks "What are we talking about?" From across the table, Ed can smell her shampoo: simple, but oddly feminine, something floral.

"Pinako's making stew tonight," Ed says. "You in?"

"Sure," she says, reaching for her beer. It's still cold, but in the summer heat that's creeping in from outside, it's formed a slick shell of condensation on the bottle.

"Good," Ed says, and knocks the last of his beer back in one determined gulp. "Well, I've got some work to do until we go to dinner, but you've got the run of the place. Just don't burn anything down."

"Don't worry," Roy says, although he doesn't say what he's thinking: that he couldn't even if he wanted to. He hadn't brought his gloves.

* * *

Edward must be lonely, Riza thinks, because she hasn't had her ear talked off this thoroughly since Hughes was alive. He's always been talkative (a fact she's listened to the Brigadier General complain about for years), but this goes beyond him simply being chatty.

Upon returning home from Pinako's, Edward got them more beers, sat them down in the living room, and begin to tell them in great detail of his travels. This is probably more for her benefit than the Brigadier's, because he had probably already been informed fairly well through Edward's letters, but he's always been a gifted storyteller, and it would be hard not to be entertained, even if you already knew the finer details.

It would have to be hard, Riza thinks, to have traveled all that way alone, particularly after never having been separated from his brother for more than a few days at a time. Alphonse, at least, traveled East in a group, and went to visit friends. Although, in typical Edward fashion, it seems like he managed to make friends along the way.

"And that's why the Queen of Brigantia said she's going to put my face on a coin," he finishes grandly.

"The smallest coin they make, right?" the Brigadier jokes.

"Ha ha," Edward deadpans. "And, no, actually. She said they'll put me on their equivalent of a twenty-five cenz piece, which, because of the exchange rate, is worth more than you'd think."

"Elric," the Brigadier says, "if you keep telling us all this, we're not going to want to buy your book."

"Hell yes you are!" Edward responds. "And for that pithy little comment, I'm gonna charge you double the retail price!" 

She had already heard from the Brigadier that Edward was planning on writing a book about his travels, and even with everything she has heard, she still thinks it's going to be amazing. Ed has a natural gift to both get into fabulous trouble, and turn even the most mundane situations into hilarious stories. Whether he is or not, Riza is almost glad that Ed isn't an alchemist anymore. The boy was born to be a writer. He had been wasted in the military.

Riza yawns.

Ed looks down at his watch (a normal, civilian wristwatch). "Shit, I hadn't realized how late it had gotten. You guys are probably exhausted."

"I am pretty beat," the Brigadier agrees.

"I'll let you guys go, then. There's no point in telling someone a story if they're just gonna fall asleep on you." 

The Brigadier marches off promptly up the stairs, but Riza stays behind to help Ed pick up all of the empty beer bottles from the coffee table and throw them away. They do so quietly, the conversational energy of the Brigadier no longer present, and when all the bottles are disposed of, Riza bids Ed goodnight and turns to go up the stairs herself. As she does so, Ed stops her, placing a hand on her arm. 

She turns around to look at him and finds that he looks much more serious than she's used to seeing him, his face unusually grave. "I'm really glad you two are here," he says seriously, as if trying to communicate a very important secret.

She gives him a smile in return. She isn't one to dole out smiles liberally, and so she hopes that this qualifies as equivalent exchange for his honesty. "I'm glad to be here." And she is, truly. While she may not hate Ishval anymore, and while she hasn't been alone, she has been a certain kind of lonely. As much as she's glad they're over, she does miss the old days sometimes, or at least parts of them: the camaraderie, the constant energy, the feeling that they were doing something important with their time, something noble. And coming to Resembool for Ed's wedding isn't that, not even close, but it does let her remember what it was like to be like that, to be one of the people who helped saved the world once.

Once she walks upstairs, she brushes her teeth with more thoroughness than she usually does, and she only realizes after spitting her toothpaste into the sink that she's stalling. She had been stalling when she had helped Ed clean up the beer bottles too, and the realization of this catches her off-guard, because she isn't exactly sure what she's postponing. She's exhausted from traveling since before sunrise and from drinking the seemingly infinite supply of beers that Ed kept ferrying from the fridge, and yet she's stalling.

They've had to bunk up together before. After all, most of the time when theywere called out somewhere, they weren't exactly being supplied with five-star accommodation. Most of the time, the status of being the only woman on their team had earned her a bed by herself, if there was one, but for various reasons and at various times, she and the Brigadier had shared a bed before. And yet, all of those times over all of those years, it never felt strange. She's never felt uncomfortable around him, never, not even when he first moved into her father's house. She likes to think that she's a solid judge of character, but this extends beyond that. She thinks that his character is as much up for debate as her own, but anything he's ever done aside, she trusts him.

And it isn't that she doesn't trust him anymore, because she does. The day she stops trusting him is the day she kills him, and thankfully that hasn't happened yet. But somewhere along the line--between having her throat sliced open and then closed up, and him losing his eyes and then getting them back, and them both going to Ishval again--something has shifted between them to where their old understanding is no longer sufficient.

When she walks into the guest room, a lamp is glowing warmly on the bedside table and the Brigadier is sitting up, flipping through the book she had brought with her on the train.

"Is this any good?" he asks absently.

"Remarkably," she says, perching at the end of the bed, "yes. It's written in poetry. I don't understand most of it, but it sounds nice, at least."

"I never knew there were Amestrian translations of any Ishvalan texts."

"There aren't anymore," Riza explains. "At the start of the Ishvalan uprising, they stopped printing most of them and pulled them from libraries and bookstores. To be found in possession of Ishvalan texts was enough to get charged with sedition." It makes sense that he wouldn't know any of this, as odd as it seems. He was in the academy before things started getting really nasty, but Riza was still at home, and with little to do aside from listen to the radio and read the paper. While it may not have felt like it within the cloister of the academy, pre-war Amestris was a scary place. Books were getting banned, and academics who specialized in Ishvalan studies were being forced into early retirement. It was not a happy time for intellectual freedom. 

"Then where did you get it?" he asks.

"It was from my father's collection," she says, and watches as his grip on the book tightens almost imperceptibly. He had helped her go through most of her father's things in the days following his death, which helped to break up the monotony of the long hours spent trying to decipher the code on her back. It had taken longer than the week's leave he had asked for last-minute from the academy, and so he stole spare hours on the weekends, coming in late and leaving early (and, conveniently, starting up rumors of him devoting his weekends to debauchery and womanizing). In the long weeks she spent alone, she went through her father's study, a task she felt like she needed to do alone. If the ghost of her father lurked anywhere in that house, he would have been there, and Riza wanted to handle it on her own. And so she went through his books, one by one, deciding what to turn over to Mr. Mustang and what to get rid of. A select few she decided to keep for herself, including this one. She knew at the time how dangerous it was to keep, but as Mr. Mustang finished up unraveling her father's notes and stopped coming by, and it became clearer and clearer that she would be joining the military as well, she felt like it was something she needed to keep. She's never had the chance to read it until now.

"Why did he have it? From what I remember, his literary interests were fairly singular."

"For the most part, yes, but there were a lot of things I didn't give you. That is one of them. You're holding a rare item."

"Ishvalan books aren't banned anymore, as far as I know. They should start reprinting stuff like this again soon."

"That's one thing I want to do while we're in Ishval," Riza says. "I want them to be able to print their own books again. Much of the Ishvalan population is aging, and I don't want things like this to get lost."

He looks at her a bit oddly, with something akin to surprise but not quite identical. "You never told me that."

She shrugs. "It would come up when it came up."

"No, you should have brought this up from the beginning. I'm going to integrate that into the official plan when we get back." He chuckles quietly. "This is why I need you around, Captain. I'm so busy looking at the big picture that I miss important details, like books. A country needs books."

She isn't used to being praised so openly, and so, instead of offering up a normal response, she says "Not necessarily. According to the introduction of that book, it was passed down orally for hundreds of years before someone wrote it down. The scribe was chased out of Ishval as a heretic, because it was deemed sacrilegious to try and write down the word of God, but people found it so convenient that they let him come back."

There are several reasons why she didn't have many friends as a child, but her ability to retain seemingly useless knowledge (as well as to panic when people try to compliment her or show her honest affection) was definitely one of them.

"It's amazing how little I know about Ishval," he remarks.

"You're learning," she replies. "We all are."

"That we are," he says, placing the book onto the nightstand, and reaching for the light. "I don't know about you, Captain, but I am beat."

"And me as well, sir," she says, climbing under the covers.

He flicks off the light. "Goodnight, Captain."

"Goodnight, sir." 

As she rolls over, facing out the window of their room, she wonders what she had ever been apprehensive about to begin with. _This is fine,_ she thinks, closing her eyes. _Everything is perfectly fine._

* * *

 _Everything is terrible,_ Riza thinks, what she guesses is about two hours later. She's unbelievably tired in the way that only travel can exhaust you, and would like nothing more than to slip into blissful unconsciousness, but their room is unnervingly quiet, and the Brigadier General sleeps like they're on a bed of pins, and turns over whenever Riza thinks that he's finally gotten settled. Riza isn't sure how long, exactly, they've been laying there, but it's long enough that Riza is starting to get annoyed.

"Captain?" the Brigadier calls quietly into the dark.

"Yes, sir?" Riza responds, attempting to not sound as aggravated as she is.

"Well, I guess that answers my question of whether you were awake or not." He flops onto his back with a sigh. "I can't sleep," he complains.

"Me either, sir," she says, at which point she hears him snicker softly. "What?"

"Nothing," he says, grin apparent in his voice. "It just sounds kind of funny for you to call me 'sir' in the middle of the night with no one else here."

"You called me 'Captain,'" she retorts.

"I guess you're right," he says, followed by a stretch of silence long enough that she thinks he may have finally fallen asleep, but Riza apparently doesn't deserve that kind of blessing. "I mean, what else would I call you?"

"What?" During the silence she had lost track of what they were talking about.

"Other than 'Captain,'" he explains.

"You mean, like my name?"

He laughs. "Yeah, I guess. You know, I can't remember the last time I called you by name."

"I can," she says instantly. "It was when I saw you in Ishval the first time. You called me 'Miss Hawkeye' and I corrected you by telling you my rank." Their conversation had been odd, but light, up until now, and the reminder of the war weighs it down like an anchor around their ankles.

"I didn't even call you Riza?" he asks, rolling over to look at her.

"I'm not sure you've ever called me Riza, actually," she muses.

"Don't you think that's strange?" he asks. "I've known you for how long now--"

"Twenty-one years," she answers.

"Good lord," he breathes. "I've known you for twenty-one years and I've never called you by your first name?"

"To your credit, we've only ever interacted in a professional capacity. You were my father's apprentice, and then you were my superior officer. It wouldn't make sense for us to be on a first-name basis."

He hums in the back of his throat, regarding her for a moment or two before rolling onto his back again. And then, almost tentatively, he asks "Would you say we're friends?"

She manages a small laugh. "I'm amazed you even have to ask that, sir."

"See? You did it again. The 'sir' thing."

"What would I call you? Your name?"

"Yeah, try it."

"This is stupid," she says.

"No, seriously, just try it."

She sighs. "Fine. Mustang."

"No, my first name."

"What difference does it make?"

"It makes a difference, trust me."

"Okay, okay. Roy. Happy?" She isn't sure why, but she feels like a child trying out a curse word at a sleepover after her parents have gone to bed. She never had such sleepovers as a child, but she supposes this is what they would be like: staying up late, sharing a bed, saying things you aren't supposed to into the dark. 

"It's weird, isn't it?"

"Yeah, I guess it is."

They lay in the dark, the feeling of some minor transgression humming in the air like static, until finally Riza asks "Can I go back to sleep now?"

"Yeah, sorry for keeping you up."

"You were keeping me up with your inability to lay still more than with your questions."

"The silence here just makes me so restless," he says. "It's so quiet. Even Ishval isn't this quiet."

"I miss the sound of cars," she says, not even really meaning to say it, but her exhaustion is making it difficult for her to keep her thoughts straight. 

"And the clock tower over Central Station," he adds. 

"And people walking back to their apartments on Saturday nights. Where I lived, there was a bar that played music close by, and on the weekends people would leave there singing."

"Did I ever go to your apartment back in Central?" he asks.

"Once, maybe twice."

"I don't remember it," he says.

"I didn't really expect you to--" She almost ends her sentence in a "sir," but stops herself.

"What did it look like?" he asks.

She thinks. It's been so long, at this point, since she moved out, but she had lived there at such a pivotal point in her life that it still leaps to her mind as if she had just left the day before. "It was small, but nice. I lived alone, of course, so I didn't need much space. You walked in and you were in the kitchen, and from there into the living room, which I never used, and so it only had a bookcase and a chair. It was cheap, so it didn't even have a fireplace. From there there was my bathroom, which only had a shower, not a bathtub, which I didn't like. There weren't showers at my father's house, if you remember, because the house was too old and we never had the money to update the plumbing. And so we only had those claw-foot bathtubs that you hated." She chuckles a bit at the memory. "You complained for a solid two weeks about them, about how you couldn't get your hair clean, and how sitting in your own filth was barbaric and unhygienic, and I told you that if you wanted a shower so badly, you could stand outside with the garden hose. You stopped complaining after that. But I was talking about my apartment in Central. So, my bedroom--" She finds herself startled by a snore. She turns over and sees that, miraculously, he has fallen asleep. Although she isn't entirely sure what to call the man who has dozed off beside her. A couple of hours before, she wouldn't have hesitated in referring to him as the Brigadier General, although a couple of years before that he would've been the Colonel, before even that, the Major, and before that, Mr. Mustang.  After she is sure that he's asleep, she says his name, "Roy," his first name, gingerly, as if handling something delicate. It doesn't feel as odd this time.

When she closes her eyes, sleep comes for her swiftly and dreamlessly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brigantia is a country I made up to be the FMA equivalent of the U.K. Assuming that Amestris et al are set up approximately like continental Europe, the U.K. (or something like it) would be to the west of them.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the super slow update, guys. School kind of smacked me in the face, and then I got dragged into Fire Emblem hell, and that's kind of taken up all my time. But anyway, here you go.

They've been trying to hustle her out of Rush Valley for an hour and a half, but every time they try to tell her to leave, she remembers another thing she needs to do. Theoretically, she should be ready to go; she's been training her apprentice-now-replacement--a brawny, awkward girl of seventeen named Lucy--for over a year at this point, and she's done enough training that, with Mr. Garfiel there to supervise, she should be fine. Lucy has most of Winry's smarts and an almost preternatural affinity for automail, but none of her people skills or personality, and that's what makes Winry nervous. She likes to think that so many people keep coming back to Garfiel's because of the good work she's doing and the quality of her labor, which may be part of it, but it's just as much the fact that she's empathetic, funny, and a good listener. People who need automail maintenance haven't had the easiest lives, and you can't just sit there like a bump on a log when they need a counselor just as much as they need a mechanic. She hopes that Lucy will grow into that a little more, especially from having her own beneficent influence for as long as she has. But she's not so sure; maybe she should just stay.

"You're getting married in less than a week, darling," Garfiel reminds her when she says as much. "You need to leave. And besides, if you don't leave soon, you're going to miss your train."

She feels a bit like how new parents must feel leaving their baby with a babysitter for the first time. Garfiel's might as well be her baby. Not that she raised it up from the ground or anything; it was running perfectly fine when she showed up. But now it runs even  _better_ than perfectly fine. And she swears to whatever it is people swear to in these situations, if Lucy manages to somehow run this place into the ground because Winry forgot to tell her something, she's just going to keel over and die.

"Oh, don't worry about that," Winry says, allowing herself a small grin. "I'm not taking the train."

Mr. Garfiel grimaces. "Darling, you're not taking that metal beast of yours all the way to Resembool, are you?'

She flashes a smile so wide that it causes her eyes to close, baring all of her teeth, a smile she's inherited from spending so much time around Ed. "You bet I am! She's my baby! And that way, I don't have to worry about train timetables."

Mr. Garfiel sighs. He really is a sweet man, but they have slightly different concerns as people. "No, but you will have to worry about getting to Resembool in the dark. And alone."

She waves away his concern. "I've had to deal with scarier things than the dark, Mr. Garfiel."

He sighs, exasperated, but fondly so. "I suppose you're right. But truly, we can hold down the fort here. Young Lucy won't burn the place down in your absence."

The young Lucy in question is standing bashfully off to the side. Winry had been bestowing last minute advice on her all morning, although at this point it may be more like last hour advice. She feels a bit bad; Lucy doesn't deserve the amount of blame that Winry is assuming she'll deserve. In all likelihood, the transition will be smooth and fine and she'll be just as happy back in Resembool as she was in Rush Valley. Lucy isn't the actual problem here and she knows it.

She walks over to Lucy, who stands a fair bit taller than her, and places a hand on either of her shoulders. Lucy startles a bit, which makes Winry feel even worse.

"Lucy," she says, and then puts on one her warmest smiles, the one that got them such consistent business. "You're gonna do great here. I just know it."

The smile that Lucy gives her lets her know that it is, in fact, time to leave.

The drive to Resembool isn't as horrible as Mr. Garfiel would make it out to be. It's long, sure, but even though she's driving, she feels like she's stretching her legs. She hasn't left Rush Valley all that much since she moved there, and so it feels nice to finally get out.

It's when she thinks this that she realizes she's crying.

She knows it's stupid to be crying right now, but she also knows that she's always been a crier, and so she isn't hugely troubled by this. It doesn't matter that what she's going toward--marriage to the man she's been in love with for practically her whole life, the hometown she adores, a wonderful job that she's been preparing for since her childhood--is amazing. She came of age in Rush Valley, had her first real job there, made friends there. She felt at home in Rush Valley. And though she knows that Resembool will always be her real home in as much as anyone has a real home, she'll miss Rush Valley. And so even though she's excited to be back, to see Ed and get married and start something new and good, she's a little sad, too, and so she indulges herself in a bit of a cry as she drives.

At least there's hardly anyone out to see her embarrass herself. Most people in Amestris still don't have cars, and so she doesn't pass many other drivers on the road aside from the occasional horse and cart. Watching their country begin to mechanize itself is exciting to her as an engineer, and she gets a pleasant warm feeling in her chest when a little girl with her arms wrapped around what Winry assumes to be her big brother on a horse turns and physically points at her as she drives past. She remembers feeling like that as a kid when she saw new technology, and she's glad that there are still little girls running around who get starry-eyed when they look at beautiful machines.

Mr. Garfiel was right, though; by the time she pulls into Resembool, the sun is beginning to slip below the horizon, tinting the clouds with shades of purple and orange. She almost starts crying again when she sees it. There's something about the sky over Resembool; there's nothing else in the world like it.

She parks in a patch of grass by the train station, and even from here, she can hear Ed's voice.

"Where the hell is she? Did you see her get off the train? I didn't see her get off the train. Do you think she missed it? Was this the wrong train? Did you check the timetable before we left?"

"Calm down, Elric," says another voice she recognizes, but not one she expected to hear. "I'm sure she's coming. Maybe you're just too short to see her through the crowd."

As much as she would like to continue leaning against the hood of her car and watching them argue like Ed's still fifteen and as short as Mustang still thinks he is, she doesn't want to watch her fiancé have an anxiety attack at the Resembool train station, and so she cups her hands around her mouth and shouts "Edward Elric!"

Ed, Mustang, and a third person she doesn't recognize at first turn to look at her. Mustang is out of uniform, but always cuts an unmistakeable figure, regardless of dress. The third person, however, she only recognizes upon seeing their face. It's Lieutenant Hawkeye, her beautiful long hair cut now to just above her ears, wearing a pale pink shirt and a simple skirt. Out of uniform, she looks almost like a different person, and she realizes that the boxiness of Amestrian military dress hides a remarkably slight build. In her sleeveless shirt, Winry can see some impressive biceps, but aside from that, she looks like any ordinary woman.

"Winry?" Ed shouts, stalking over to her. "What the fuck! You weren't on the train."

"Yeah, I drove," she replies evenly.

Ed blinks rapidly. "What?" He looks at the car. "When did you get a car?"

Winry grins smugly, crossing her arms over her chest. "I built it."

It's amazing, Winry thinks, that Ed can still be cute even when he's slack-jawed like this. "What? When?"

"I had to do something while you were off gallivanting for a year."

"So you just built a car?"

"Babe, I build automail for a living. Do you really think that a car is that much more difficult?"

She's startled out of their back and forth by a small, dry laugh from Lieutenant Hawkeye.

"I do hope he hasn't been boring you stiff with dumb questions," Winry says cheekily.

"Not at all," the Lieutenant replies. 

Winry smiles. "Good. Now, can we get going?"

"Are we not going to talk about the fact that I was sure you'd been kidnapped and murdered?" Ed asks, still sounding a bit frantic.

"Are we not gonna talk about the fact that I've been driving for hours and my feet hurt and I'd really like some dinner? Because that's what I'd like to talk about."

Ed sighs. "Fine, Win. Fine. I know you can handle yourself and all, but I'm--"

"Paranoid and anxious and dumb?" Winry finishes for him.

Ed grimaces. "Well, when you put it like that."

"Let's go home," Winry says, and Ed nods.

She watches as Mustang and Lieutenant Hawkeye climb into the car, with Mustang holding open the door for her and her walking around to the opposite side of the car to open the door herself.

Once both doors are closed, Winry places a hand on either side of Ed's face, forcing him to look her in the eyes.

"Hey," she says. "I missed you."

He smiles, a small smile with none of his usual showiness. "I missed you, too," he says, and places a soft kiss on her mouth.

She grins into the kiss. This, she thinks. This is what makes leaving Rush Valley 100% worth it. 

The car always starts with a bit of a startling rattle, but once she gets going, Hildegaard (an old family name that always makes her think of Valkyries, and which she thinks fits her somewhat ramshackle steed perfectly) runs like a dream. Ed is gripping the console like he's worried that car will explode, but Winry just takes his right hand in her left, gripping the wheel with her other hand.

"Shouldn't you be driving with both hands?" Ed asks, holding onto her hand with the steadfastness of a drowning man gripping a life preserver.

"Shouldn't you be thinking of what I should make for dinner?" Winry counters, sweeping a thumb over his knuckles.

"Actually," Mustang says from the backseat. "I thought that I might actually make dinner tonight. You said yourself that you're exhausted, and besides, I think I should repay you for your hospitality."

"That's very kind of you, Colonel--"

"Brigadier General," Ed, Mustang, and Hawkeye say simultaneously.

"Oh, sorry, I didn't know you'd been promoted. That's very kind of you, _Brigadier General_ , but you really don't have to."

"Actually," Hawkeye says unexpectedly, "the Brigadier is quite a good cook. And I'd like to thank you both as well. I'm no master chef, but I'm sure I could chop some vegetables or something."

Winry checks her rearview mirror, surprised, and sees Mustang and Hawkeye both looking at her earnestly. "I mean, if you're sure. I haven't had someone cook for me in ages. This one--" she pats Ed's thigh affectionately, "could burn water."

"That's not true!" Ed shouts, offended. 

Winry pauses at a crossroads to let a shepherd guide his flock from one pasture to another and bestows a kiss upon one of Ed's cheeks. It's a little scratchy, she thinks. He needs to shave. "It's a good thing you're cute," she says, shifting the car back into gear.

Back home, Ed helps her carry her things into their room, and she closes the bedroom door behind her as he sets a suitcase down at the foot of the bed with a heavy  _thwump_. 

"So, when were you planning on telling me that we had houseguests?" Winry asks.

"Did I not tell you they were going to be here?" Winry shakes her head. "Oh, jeez, Win, I'm sorry. I've just been really frazzled with the wedding and the book and--"

"Everything?" Winry finishes. Ed sighs. She sits down at the edge of the bed and pats the space next to her. When he sits, she places her head on his shoulder. "Okay, so we can't ever get divorced, because I don't think you'd survive planning another wedding."

"Well of course we won't get divorced!" Ed says. "Did you even think that was a possibility?"

"Babe," she says, placating, reaching up with one hand to work his hair out of its ponytail so that she can run her fingers through it. "It was a joke. You love jokes, remember?"

"I still love jokes," Ed says, and she can hear the tension start to dribble away in his voice as she plays with his hair. He's like a cat. She's pretty sure that if she scratched him behind the ear, he'd start to purr. "I'm super funny."

"I know you are, babe," she soothes. "That's one of the many reasons why I'm marrying you."

"What are the other ones?"

"Well, definitely not the fact that you're nosy," she says, tickling him in the ribs. "Now, come on, let's go make sure nobody burns down the house. I must say, I'm a little bit skeptical about Mustang's cooking skills."

"You and me both," Ed says. "Although, if he wants to go above and beyond the duties of a polite houseguest, who am I to stop him?"

Back downstairs, the atmosphere is jovial, which is helped by the fact that Mustang found the gramophone and had put a record on, one of the swing records that Winry likes. He's sipping from a glass of wine held in his left hand while he sautés something with his right. At the other end of the kitchen, Lieutenant Hawkeye is dutifully chopping vegetables with a kind of swiftness and accuracy that makes Winry wonder if she's wielded a knife in other capacities before.

"I've gotta say, Elric," Mustang says upon seeing them descend the stairs. "Your taste in music is not as bad as I was anticipating."

Ed is about to respond angrily (probably something about _of course_ he has good taste, what was Mustang expecting?) but Winry beats him to it. "This record is mine, actually."

Mustang smirks. "See, that makes a lot more sense. I always knew you were too good for him."

Winry wraps her arms around Ed's middle and plants a sloppy kiss on his cheek. "He's okay, I guess."

"Would you like some wine?" Mustang asks with a showy flip of the food in the pan, which from the look of it appears to be shrimp. "The Captain and I picked up a bottle when we went out to get groceries. 

Winry is not much of a wine aficionado; she prefers beer herself, but something about this exchange feels like a test of her age, and so she can't exactly turn it down.

"Oh, uh, sure," she says, and without prompting, Lieutenant (wait, did he say Captain?) Hawkeye grabs her a glass from a cabinet and pours it for her, the wine sparkling a clear, crisp gold. She raises the glass to her lips, trying to not focus too hard on how Mustang is looking at her expectantly, and manages to swallow a mouthful without wrinkling her nose. Well, it's not awful, but all wine tastes the same to her. She doesn't want to insult him though, especially not when he bought the bottle (which was probably worth about as much as a nice automail wrench), and so she takes another tentative sip and hopes that it starts to taste better the more she drinks of it.

"You gonna offer me any?" Ed asks.

"Do you even like wine?" Mustang responds.

"Well, no, but I would at least appreciate being asked."

Hawkeye snorts from her position at the cutting board.

"The Captain doesn't like wine either," Mustang says.

Winry finds this hard to believe. She had always held Hawkeye up as the pinnacle of mature femininity, from the moment they met and she had brought her tea all those years ago. She had been so calm and poised and beautiful, and Winry had just always assumed she'd be the kind of person who had wine with dinner. That seemed like the kind of thing grownups did.

"I like my liquor stronger," is the only elaboration that Hawkeye gives, which seems to Winry to be even cooler than liking wine.

"It's fine, honestly," Mustang says, and snatches the bottle from its spot on the counter. "I mainly bought it for the food." He splashes some into the pan, causing it to flare up brightly.

Ed claps sardonically. "I see you're still a pyro."

Winry may be seeing things, but she thinks Mustang's smile looks a bit more strained at that.

"In more productive ways now," Mustang says quietly.

Winry knows that time does funny things to people. After all, she has probably the two best examples of that for her closest friends. But she had always thought of Mustang as being fairly constant, already set it in who he was. That probably had something to do with the disparity in their ages when she met him, because to her he was most certainly an adult, and adults don't need to grow anymore. She knows now that that's not true, but she thinks that something about him has softened somewhat in recent years. His bravado seems to be a bit more brittle than it used to be. And while she knows that he and Ed are closer than he is with her, he's worried that Ed's anxiety may cause him to say something he might regret, and so she decides to divert the subject.

"Where did you learn to cook like this?" Winry asks. "Most guys turn their noses up at it."

"Truthfully?" he asks, and she nods.  "When I was in Central, and especially in East, I had a lot of free time, and so I would listen to cooking shows on the radio. Gave me something to do, and it also meant that I wasn't eating macaroni and cheese every night like every other guy I knew fresh out of the academy."

Winry laughs. "I wish I could get this one to do something like that," she says, gesturing at Ed. "We're both hopeless."

"I'm telling you," Mustang says, pointing with a spatula. "The Central Simmer is great."

"I've listened to that!" Winry says excitedly. "Maribella Osten is the chef, right? She has a lovely voice."

"That's not the only lovely thing about her," Mustang says wickedly. "I took her on a date once."

"You didn't!"

Ed groans. "Enough gossip, when will dinner be ready?"

"It'll be ready when it's ready," Mustang snaps.

Winry giggles. This is nice, she thinks. She never thought, back when she saw Ed and Al maybe once every two or three months to get Ed's automail tuned up and then sent them off again to continue looking for the philosopher's stone, that this would be what her future looked like. She was a little sad to be leaving Rush Valley this morning, but as she sits at the counter, listening to her future husband and her friend (if only she could tell her twelve-year-old self that Roy Mustang, the Hero of Ishval, would be her friend one day) bickering over dinner, she knows that this is where she is supposed to be.

Their dinner is only made exceptional by their shared history looming large behind it. Roy speaking blithely about the mundane politics of bureaucracy only seems remarkable with the knowledge that he is rebuilding a country he helped to destroy. Ed grousing about wedding planning, gesticulating wildly as he does so, only seems amazing when Winry remembers when one of those arms used to gleam metallic.

Hawkeye is notably silent, her eyes rarely leaving Mustang, seated beside her.

Winry sips at her single cup of wine slowly, still not appreciating it very much.

After dinner has concluded, Hawkeye pipes in with her first contribution to the conversation all night.

"Well, now that we're all too stuffed to talk, I should probably clean up," Mustang says, beginning to rise from the table, but, to everyone's surprise, Hawkeye stops him.

"I'll do the dishes, actually," she says smoothly. "After all, you cooked everything yourself."

"You chopped vegetables," Mustang reminds her.

"That hardly qualifies as cooking."

"How about I wash and you dry, then?"

"I wash, you dry."

"Fine," Mustang says, and Winry has the distinct feeling that this is what diplomatic meetings with them must feel like.

"Thank you for the dinner," Winry says brightly as she pushes her chair back from the table. "It was lovely."

"Of course," Mustang says. "I really do appreciate you both letting me stay here." He stops, but only for a beat, to amend his statement: "For letting  _us_ stay here. It means a lot to me. To us." Watching him try to do something so simple as thanking her for her hospitality is like watching him try to speak a language he isn't entirely comfortable in. It's like he's got everything down but the difference between the first-person-singular and the first-person-plural. She thinks there's something going on in his confusion over the correct way to use "I" and "we," but she says nothing of it.

She and Ed retire themselves to the living room, Ed seating himself on the couch and Winry leaning her back against his chest. Effortlessly, he wraps his arms around her middle, like a kind of autonomic response, something his nerves just know to do. She is a little disappointed that her first night back in Resembool has them with unexpected houseguests (she refuses to have sex with Mustang and Hawkeye in her house; that's just way too weird), but this is enough for right now: Ed's arms around her waist, food cooked for her by friends in her belly, the quiet bustle of two people doing dishes, and the quiet of Resembool closing them in on all sides, heavy but not oppressive, like a duvet. 

"Hey, Ed," she says tentatively, even though she's fairly certain that the sound of the sink drowns out whatever she's saying.

"Yeah, Win?" Ed says, and Winry can already hear the post-dinner lethargy creeping into his voice. She swears, he's like an infant that way. She'll have to fight to keep him awake.

"Do you notice anything? Between those two." She cocks her head in the direction of the kitchen, and avoids using their names, in the hopes that no nosy ears will perk at her words.

Ed snorts. "Well, yeah, obviously. I'm surprised it's taken you so long to notice."

She elbows him in the ribs, gently. "I haven't seen them in literal  _years_ , Ed."

"Yeah, but even before," he presses. "Didn't you notice it then?"

"I didn't see them that much, honestly. Before." Somehow, that simply two-syllable word manages to encapsulate everything they've been through, all the heartache and the triumph and the tragedy. Language is an amazing thing.

"They've been like this for as long as I've known them," Ed says languidly, the sleep creeping back into his voice.

Winry thinks back as far as she can, to the first time she met them, and it's like when one of her automail pieces finally begins to run, all the gears slotting together in a way she never anticipated. Hawkeye had told her about killing, about how she had had to kill, but all of that was secondary, because she had someone she had to protect. It hadn't made much sense at the time, because Winry was young, and had only just met the woman, but now, in hindsight, it all seemed clear. Everything she had done, she had done for Mustang. How had Winry not noticed? It now seemed abundantly obvious. But, then again, how long had it taken her to notice that she was in love with Ed? It was less idiocy than a failure to grasp every available possibility.

"Do they know? Or are they as hopeless as we were?"

"If possible, they may be even  _more_ hopeless."

"That is honestly impressive." And a little sad, too. She turns her head to look into the kitchen, Hawkeye's figure military-straight as ever, even over the sink, elbow-deep in dish suds. Mustang receives every damp plate and fork with a dignity unusual for someone washing dishes, and dries them all gently, like an old-school butler polishing silver. She can't hear what they're saying, speaking hushed like they are, but in a moment almost dazzling in how unexpected it is, she sees Hawkeye crack the barest of smiles.

"They look happy," Winry says.

Ed sighs, a noise unusually adult for him, the sigh of a man who had spent a long day at work rather than one who leaves his book notes all over their house and almost had an anxiety attack when he thought she had missed her train. "I wish you were right."

"What do you mean?" she asks, craning her neck to look at him. His eyes are closed, and he looks a little bit younger that way. She'll always remember him as a boy sleeping, not yelling, like she always joked about.

"You'd be hard-pressed to find two people in all of Amestris who hate themselves more than those two."

Something cold and hard twists in Winry's belly. She'll admit, she doesn't know nearly as much about either of them as he does, but it's hard to see that, what with Mustang's theatricality, and Hawkeye's tacit nature. They both craft façades thick as military fortresses, uninviting and impenetrable. Ed has managed to weasel his way into Mustang's trust, and doesn't seem to be particularly happy with what he's found.

"That's not fair," Winry says, the acute sense of justice she felt in her girlhood rising up in her throat, never quite gone, only dampened, like water tossed onto coals. "They're both great people; they deserve to be happy."

"They're both great people who have done terrible things," Ed corrects.

"Haven't we all?" Winry asks.

"No," Ed says, shaking his head, eyes flicking open to meet hers, gold like the metal that all those ancient alchemists sought. "Not like they have. As much as I love them both, what they feel for themselves is warranted. I wouldn't be able to live with myself either if I had done half the things that they have."

Winry purses her lips tight together. It seems so hard to reconcile, what Ed is telling her with what she has seen: Mustang, who likes radio cooking shows and wine; Hawkeye, with her quiet sense of duty and her occasional flashes of humor. Who could hate them?

"The funny thing is, though," Ed continues, "no matter how much they may hate themselves, they can't see that in each other. They would gladly die for each other, because they trust each other more than anyone else they know. They always have, and probably always will."

"But they're not..."

"No, they're not."

Winry hums, low in her throat, and hears the sound of the faucet stopping.

She pats Ed's thigh a couple times, pulling his attention back to her and away from the kitchen. "We should get you to bed; I think you'll sleep on this couch otherwise."

Ed yawns. "You just got back, and somehow I'm already being threatened with sleeping on the couch."

"Oh, shut up," Winry says, turning to plant a kiss on his mouth before standing with a yawn of her own.

They bid Mustang and Hawkeye a quick goodnight before going to their room. Upon closing the door, Winry inhales deeply. It's funny how your room smells like nothing when you live there, but as soon as you leave you become keenly reminded of all the smells that make up home: her cheap shampoo and Ed's expensive soap, mailed in a care package from Xing by Al, the smell of clean sheets, and the indescribable  _green_ smell of Resembool, floating through the open windows.

They undress quietly and climb into bed, Winry wriggling under Ed's arm, already heavy with the approach of sleep. 

Ed leans down, placing a kiss at the top of her head.

"I've missed this," he says quietly into her hair.

"I've missed you," she replies.

It's odd; she has never felt more at home or more at peace anywhere than she feels here, in her bed, in Ed's arms, with the windows open and the cool breeze of her hometown rolling through. But even with that, she can't help but feel a small kernel of sadness, thinking about the two people who harbor such love for each other, but such hate for themselves, doing who knows what downstairs. They could be sitting directly beside each other, but still be miles away. She wants for them to be happy. She wants for them to have even a shred of what she has here.

 _I'll work on that tomorrow_ , she thinks, nuzzling closer to her fiancé. But, for now, she just wants to sleep.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is both a little shorter (I think; I'm on mobile so I'm not sure) and a little lighter on the Royai than the last few since I'm trying to get everybody to Resembool for the wedding, so be forewarned.
> 
> Also I'm in the middle of finals and I'll be leaving the country in a couple weeks, so I'm not sure when the next update will be, but stay tuned~

Riza wakes suddenly to a thud and a yell emanating from downstairs, and she reaches instinctively for the gun she keeps beneath her pillow, only to grasp cotton sheets and the realization that she hadn't packed her gun.

"It's impolite to bring a gun to a wedding," the Brigadier had chided her back in Ishval, which seems fair, she supposes, but she couldn't think of the last time she had gone  _anywhere_ without at least one gun. She feels oddly naked, like she's parading around Resembool in a backless dress with her tattoo and her scars on display for everyone to see. She knows that those two things aren't equivocal, but to her it's a slippery slope from being unarmed to being entirely defenseless and having all her secrets in the open for everyone to see.

"Then it's probably also impolite to bring weapons of mass destruction," she countered.

He regarded her cautiously, in the process of folding up a pair of his ignition gloves, before nodding. "I suppose you're right." He set them aside, and would later stow them in a locked box in his bedside table. "It's just a wedding, right?"

She curses her complacency and hops out of bed, bare feet connecting with the hardwood floor, and inches toward the door of the guest room. While she misses it like a phantom limb, she's not entirely useless without her gun. She did go through the military academy, after all; she's competent in hand-to-hand combat and can hold her own. She's sure that she could handle any intruders who have decided to come into the Elrics' home.

Except that she doesn't have to.

"Al, get  _off_ of me!"

"Sorry, brother, I can't do that. I haven't seen you in over a year, so you're just going to have to deal with it."

Riza pauses at the foot of the stairs, watching a very tall Alphonse Elric trying his damnedest to squeeze the breath out of his brother's lungs, and a slightly smaller Edward Elric trying to wriggle, to no avail, out of his brother's embrace. A young Xingese woman is laughing loudly, small, pearlescent tears springing at the corner of her eyes, bent forward, arms wrapped around her middle. 

"Don't you laugh at me, Mei Chang!" Edward wheezes.

"I'll laugh at whoever I want to laugh at!" the girl responds.

Suddenly it makes sense, and Riza feels her shoulders sag as the tension leaves them. These aren't intruders at all; these are Ed's friends. Mei Chang is somehow even prettier than the picture Ed had shown them had led her to believe, but still quite small. A man who could only be Ling Yao is smiling enigmatically, eyes closed and hands hidden in the sleeves of his shirt, flanked on either end by two people she struggles to recognize. Seeing the gleam of automail coming out of the sleeve of the woman's shirt, she realizes that she is Lan Fan. Her posture is still bodyguard-tense, something she can empathize with, but she's standing closer to Ling that Riza remembers her ever doing.

"This is adorable and everything," says the man on Ling's other side, "but when's lunch?"

Ling snickers and the man sighs dramatically.

"Go on," the man says. "Say it."

"Say what?" Ling asks, false innocence cloying.

"I swear," the man says, peering across Ling to lock eyes with Lan Fan. "How have you put up with him for so long?"

"Oh, come on," Ling says, eyes cracking open to gleam mischieviously. "I was just gonna say that you're sounding awfully  _greedy_."

The man throws up his arms in frustration. "I don't deserve this."

Riza catches the Brigadier's eye from across the kitchen. He's sitting at the kitchen table, serenely sipping coffee and watching the entire mess unfold in front of him with all the placidity of an aging king surveying his kingdom. "Lunch?" she asks. "What time is it?"

"A little after noon," the Brigadier answers.

Riza is proud of herself for not gaping. She's pretty sure she's never slept this late in her entire life. "Why didn't you wake me?"

The Brigadier shrugs. "I felt bad for keeping you up so late last night, so I figured I'd let you sleep."

Ling's eyes meet hers and the implication in them makes her stomach twist in embarrassment. None of them know that she was up so late because the Brigadier snores, and would wake up intermittently and ask her odd questions, and that the only reason they're sharing a bed in the first place is because of a hilarious case of miscommunication. But she's not an idiot; she knows that rumors have been swirling about her and the Brigadier General long before he was ever the Brigadier General. Even her father, in a rare moment of paternal concern, expressed his worry that his daughter and his apprentice were perhaps getting a little too close.

They weren't. Even at sixteen, Roy Mustang had a reputation among her small town's young, eligible women, and spent most of his weekends taking them on dates. All these girls were prettier and older than her, a boyish fourteen-year-old whose nicest dress was made of denim and meant to be worn over something else like overalls. She was awkward and cautious and occasionally bitingly mean, especially to Roy, and so of course nothing untoward transpired between them. She couldn't imagine, even as young as she was, holding one of his smooth, studious hands, with their long fingers that she would expect to belong to a piano player, not an alchemist's apprentice, with one of her own callused hands, with dirt under her fingernails, and with the pinky of her right hand being slightly crooked from where she had broken it as a young girl and had never been taken to the doctor to get it set.

After he left, though, a couple of years later, left her in that house with her father while he was off doing Big Important Things at the military academy, things that were Bigger and More Important than her, she found herself thinking, in her fevered, pubescent brain, that what if something had happened? What would she have done if one rainy afternoon he had turned those sharp black eyes of his on her with the same heat he directed at the girls in her town? She vacillated between thinking she would have turned him down sharply and shrewdly, with the finality of a door closing, and choosing to not let him seduce her, closing the gap between them herself and claiming his mouth as hers, not the other way around. Both of those were brave options, though, and she was a frightened girl. In all likelihood she would've done nothing, just frozen, like the doe she once pointed a shotgun at but never had the heart to shoot.

She knows now that those thoughts were likely the product of an isolated, lonely adolescence, with Roy being the only object she could project her teenage fantasies on, but it still makes something small and bashful shrivel inside of her whenever the nature of their relationship inevitably gets brought up. No, there is nothing between them, and there never has been, and she got her job herself, not because she was fucking her superior officer, and she would really appreciate if everyone would just let it go and accept that men and women can just be friends without it being some covert attempt to hide their sexual relationship, thank you very much.

And so, instead of blushing like she would've done at sixteen, she simply says "You should feel bad; you snore like a lawnmower."

The Brigadier General looks very affronted at that, sputtering something about how that couldn't possibly be true, and how she is slandering his good name, but she doesn't listen, instead watching Ling Yao's eyes close, very slowly, like a cat's. She isn't sure how to interpret that gesture, and so she doesn't. 

But, luckily for her, her sex life is not the topic of conversation this afternoon.

Edward disentangles himself from his brother's long limbs, still held somewhat awkwardly, like he isn't entirely used to having his body back yet, and places his fists on his hips, turning his attention back to the caravan that had arrived from Xing. "I hope you know I can't put all of you up. Al's got a room here, but the rest of you are going to need to stay somewhere else." He casts a wary eye onto Mei, who, to her credit, doesn't blush or shrink away, standing as tall as she can in her five feet. "Although maybe  _one_ of you could sleep on the couch."

"We're staying at the inn in town, actually," says Lan Fan, her voice soft but economical and sure. Riza can't remember hearing her speak much before, but she'd also never seen her out of her bodyguard garb, and yet here she stands, in a pair of comfortable-looking, wide-legged red pants. 

"Okay, good," Edward says, clearly trying to sound more put-upon than he actually feels. The joy he feels at seeing his friends and his brother again after such a long time is only barely concealed behind his eyes and in the way he holds his mouth. "I've got enough on my hands with these two," he says, gesturing toward her and the Brigadier. 

"Oh, I'm sure you do," Ling says, eyes still cryptically closed, smile unnervingly innocent. 

"So, lunch?" the man beside Ling asks, tiredly irritated.

"Right, lunch," Ed says with a sigh. "I'll feed you all if you help cook." He looks at Ling before correcting: "I'll feed you a normal amount. I won't have you eating me out of house and home when you aren't even staying with me."

"Of course," Ling says blithely.

Ed goes about divvying up the labor, and sends Riza and the Brigadier out onto the front porch to peel vegetables.

The breeze is cool, and serves to settle Riza's nerves somewhat, and they peel potatoes and carrots in companionable silence. But Ling Yao's obscure comments sit heavily on her mind, and so, trying to keep tentativeness out of her voice, she says "You need to be careful what you say around people."

"How do you mean?" he asks, delicately peeling a carrot. 

"What you said about us sharing a room. You know how people talk; we're going to be hot gossip until the wedding."

He shrugs. "That sounds like everyone else's problem, not ours."

She chuckles. "For someone who wants to be a public official, you seem awfully unconcerned with what people say about you."

"It's not that. I'm acutely concerned with what people say about me. But these are our friends, and whatever they say about us is harmless."

"I suppose," Riza says, placing a newly peeled potato in a bowl.

"You don't sound like you believe me."

"I don't like being gossiped about," Riza says.

"You get used to it," the Brigadier replies lightly.

"No, _you_ get used to it. I'm not used to people talking about me, and I don't like it."

"People have always talked about you, though," he says.

She stops peeling and looks at him. "What do you mean?"

He cracks a smile. "Back in Ishval, you were practically an urban legend. Before I knew you were there, I heard stories about a young cadet who could hit a target from a mile away. I thought you were a guy, honestly, some upstart from Central, but no, you were you."

She knows, consciously, that she is a person who exists in the minds and lives of others, but it's still odd to think that she had a reputation that preceded her in the same way the Brigadier did.

"Really?" she asks.

He nods. "Yup. And even before then, back at your dad's place."

"Seriously? What could people have said about me back then? I hardly left the house."

"That's mainly what they talked about. They were scared of you, a lot of them. A little girl, living practically alone in that big, old house on the edge of town with your crazy genius dad and me."

She laughs a little at that. "I remember you as a teenager. They were probably worried I was your kept woman or something."

He smirks. "Who's feeding the gossip mill now?" 

* * *

"So Ling," Ed says cautiously, stirring a pot as Ling tosses spices in seemingly at random. He does literally have his eyes closed, and Ed is worried that their lunch may prove inedible.

"So Ed," Ling says, shaking in a dangerous-looking amount of cayenne pepper.

"You brought quite the group with you. I thought it asked if you had a plus _one_  on the invitation."

"Did it," Ling says, not in a questioning tone of voice, still shaking pepper.

"If I remember the invitations, they did. And I do, because I designed the invitations."

"You did? They were very tasteful."

"No, don't try to bamboozle me with compliments, Ling. Who's the guy?"

"You mean you don't recognize him?"

"No, I've never seen him before in my life."

"That's actually not true. I'm sure if you think on it long enough, you'll remember where you've met before."

Ed looks over his shoulder as sneakily as he can, to where the guy and Lan Fan, who admitted to having no culinary prowess, are setting the table.

The guy has a very distinctive nose, and a sense of style even tackier than his own when he was a teenager, wearing a fur-collared vest despite the heat, and spiky dark hair. He looks distinct enough that Ed can't imagine having met him before and forgotten about it.

"I know a lot of people, Ling. Can I get a hint?"

"He's Greed."

The sudden revelation coupled with the realization that, yes, Ling's right, that's definitively Greed, causes Ed to almost flip over the bubbling pot he's stirring.

"You look concerned," Ling says coolly.

"Fuck, you're right I'm concerned!" Ed stage-whispers. 

"Why?"

Ed hisses through his teeth and turns to the kitchen table. "Can you guys watch this pot for a minute? I need to show Ling something upstairs."

"You do?" Ling asks.

"Yeah, Ling, I do."

"I think we can handle that," the guy says, and Lan Fan fixes Ed with her unwavering dark eyes.

"Come on," Ed says, and grips the end of Ling's sleeve, dragging him out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

Once they get to his and Winry's room, he shuts the door behind them and whispers "Do you think Lan Fan would have followed us up here?"

"I think she would have wanted to, but Greed probably didn't let her."

Ed sighs. He just wants to get married, and it sounded like such a good idea to invite all of his friends, but now he's wondering if he's made a horrible mistake.

"So. Greed. A homunculus."

"Yup," Ling says, supremely unbothered.

"I thought he was dead. Was I mistaken in that?"

"Nope, he was definitely dead."

"Now, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I thought you couldn't bring people back from the dead. Believe me, I tried, and it doesn't work."

"You're right," Ling says. "You can't bring _people_ back. But homunculi aren't really people, and so the restrictions are a little bit fuzzy."

Ed blinks up at his friend, who he occasionally forgets is quite intelligent and quite capable because he's such a blaring idiot, who somehow managed to raise a man from the dead. And so the only thing he can think to ask is: " _How_?"

"I struck up a deal."

"With the devil?"

"No, with Mei Chang. Same difference, if you ask me. But I told her that I'd get her an in with the imperial institute of alkahestry if she'd do me a favor."

"And your favor was reviving a homunculus?"

"Yup."

He also can't imagine Mei, who used to be three feet high with a shrill little voice and an embarrassing crush on his brother, successfully accomplishing this monumental feat, but he can't deny it. That is definitely Greed the Avaricious in his kitchen, touching his plates and silverware.

"Why?"

Ling thinks for a moment, tucking his hands back into his sleeves, before opening up his eyes a sliver. "You've never had a person living in your head with you."

"No, you're right there."

"It's kind of like..." Ling ponders, unusually thoughtful. "It's kind of like being in love, in a way. Having someone in your head all the time, occupying all your thoughts, knowing everything about you. And so when he was gone, I kind of missed him. He had been a part of me for so long, and so having him gone was weird."

"So you love him?"

Ling's eyes snap shut and he shrugs. "More or less."

Ed crosses his arms. "So how does Lan Fan feel about this arrangement?"

Ling smiles. "She was asking for him back as loudly as I was."

* * *

Al and Mei have gotten very good at communicating silently. They've had to, being in alkahestry lessons together all the time and being unable to talk. And so every flick of the eyes, wiggle of eyebrows, and emphatic lifting of her glass carries with it a comment on their companions.

"So where's that gorgeous fiancée of yours, Elric?" Greed asks loudly.

"You shut the fuck up about my fiancée, Greed," Ed says, lifting his fork threateningly before adding "But if you must know, she's at work."

The way Mei taps her fork against her plate clearly says _They'll never grow up, will they_?

"I thought she wasn't supposed to be working right now?" Mustang asks.

Ed snorts. "Do you seriously think that something as silly as a wedding would keep Winry Rockbell from working on automail?"

The way her dimples crinkle as she smiles means _I think I like her_ , and the way Al raises his water to his lips means _Yeah, she's the best._

"I suppose you make a fair point," Mustang concedes.

Hawkeye smiles slightly at that, and Mei's raised eyebrow means _What's going on there?_ Al's eye roll means _They're hopeless._

The conversations flows and ebbs naturally, like they haven't not seen each other in years, picking up on the downbeat like nothing has changed, even though nearly everything has. They're older now, with new haircuts and ranks and scars and occasionally whole new bodies. But aside from that they're still themselves, and they still love each other as much as they did back when they were all primarily worried about trying not to die.

Mei's small foot knocking against his shin (her feet don't quite reach the floor) means _I like you_. Him rapping her foot with his means _I like you, too_. 

Sometimes things are simple. It's the simple things that Al is grateful for the most.


End file.
